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Toronto community grants not targeting the most challenged areas

Elizabeth Buchanan has the kind of space at her Tobermory Dr. community centre that any organization would covet.

The walls are there — framing the big open space with burnt orange concrete floors on the ground level of the 25-storey community housing highrise just east of Jane St. and Finch Ave. They’ve been freshly painted red and green and yellow.

15 Tobermory Dr., a Toronto Community Housing highrise, has space for community programs, but not the city funding to operate them. They are one of 800 organizations that receive some city money annually. (Jennifer Pagliaro / Toronto Star)

Jennifer Kumar is a resident and volunteer at 15 Tobermory Dr. who helps run a pay-what-you-can thrift shop on the building's main floor. (Jennifer Pagliaro / Toronto Star)

The staff and volunteers at Tobermory Community Activities have the space but not the resources to fund community programs at their TCHC highrise. From left: Jennifer Kumar, Trevor Dixon, James Nyewuto, Elizabeth Buchanan, Victoria Grendys. (Jennifer Pagliaro / Toronto Star)

The staff and volunteers at Tobermory Community Activities have the space but not the resources to fund community programs at their TCHC highrise. From left: James Nyewuto, Trevor Dixon, Jennifer Kumar and Elizabeth Buchanan. (Jennifer Pagliaro / Toronto Star)

Toronto Community Housing recently helped renovate the bright and essentially empty space Buchanan operates with a small team of volunteers. She manages to keep the door of Tobermory Community Activities office open two days out of seven — offering much-needed services to some 1,200 residents, including an overpopulated food bank.

Still, some call her when she’s away. There are too many needs and never enough time. She has dreamed of starting seniors’ and youth programs.

“No dreams have come,” says Buchanan now. “People here are so committed and involved, but there’s nothing to be involved in.”

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Tobermory may not be alone. The city allocates more than $40 million every year for community programs through the Community Partnership and Investment Program (CPIP). But a Star investigation shows the city does not have up-to-date data on what money is going where, appears to send more money to downtown wards at the cost of suburban wards, and appears not to be targeting the city’s most challenged neighbourhoods with investment funds.

In 2008 and 2011, the top-funded neighbourhoods were the Waterfront and the Bay Street corridor — topping $7 million and $3 million each — while communities such as Mount Dennis, a priority neighbourhood then and now, recorded between a total of $83,000 and zero city grant funds.

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Tobermory’s program, funded through the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, is just one of more than 800 programs that received funding from city grants in 2013. But with just $29,455 budgeted for this year, it’s not enough to fill up the space with staff or even furniture.

Wanda MacNevin is director of community programs at the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, which was granted $146,000 total by the city in 2013 through CPIP.

Neighbourhood Improvement areas and city grant funding

CPIP isn’t the only way organizations get money from the city, but it represents a large pool of cash — $47.4 million in 2013 — dedicated for communities and solely administered by the city. The program is heavily used, with more applications than can be fulfilled.

After growing frustrated about the lack of funds to keep programs like Tobermory’s afloat, and unable to get the data she needed from the city, MacNevin conducted her own research on funding disparities across the city.

She picked five organizations from each of the city’s four corners and asked for their financial records. What she found was a startling disparity between north and south.

The three wards that cover the Jane-Finch area have a combined population of nearly 150,000 people, compared with three of the downtown core’s wards at 200,000. But the funding total from all government grants for five selected organizations only totalled $14.4 million in North York, less than half of the funds that went to the downtown wards, $32.2 million.

The problem directly affects staffing levels, which in turn affect the ability to deliver programming. For example, MacNevin’s community service in North York has 277 full- and part-time staff across 15 community-based organizations; compare that with a place like the downtown WoodGreen Community Services on Danforth Ave., which has 650 full- and part-time staff. (WoodGreen also received double the number of CPIP dollars the Family Centre did in 2013.)

Though not a perfect study, MacNevin said the numbers are symptomatic of the larger problem.

“There are needs across the city,” she said. “I think it’s well past the catch-up time of making sure there’s equity with city funding going across the city.”

With many individual organizations in Jane-Finch — one of the most challenged neighbourhoods with a higher than average number of immigrants and low-income families — getting less than $25,000 in community grants, MacNevin argues the city is “throwing away” its money. Those organizations, she said, are barely able to pay one staff member with that level of funding.

“What is one person supposed to do to make an impact or a change in the community?” she said. “There’s got to be a better way of doing it.”

Jenn Miller, the city’s manager of community funding, says many of the grants are focused on programs that benefit marginalized communities, including the new “neighbourhood improvement areas” established in March — 31 communities that incorporate many of the city’s previous 13 “priority neighbourhoods,” all of which have been identified as needing extra help in areas such as health, economics, political participation and education.

When asked whether the grants program gives preference to those communities, Miller said it depends on the program’s “area of focus.”

“While place-based/neighbourhood-based investments are a consideration, it is not a requirement for city funding,” Miller said in an email. That means just being located in an identified neighbourhood improvement area does not make an organization a priority for funding.

It’s unclear whether the city is invested in a “moneyball” approach to this area of spending, because there’s so little public information about how it sets priorities. (For example, the city does not have data to show how much grant money flowed to improvement areas in 2013 and 2014.)

That’s not unusual in government; in a recent Atlantic article, two former White House administrators estimated that less than $1 out of every federal $100 spent was allocated according to evidence-based returns.

The “moneyball” concept is a riff off of the Oakland A’s major league success strategy (chronicled in a Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt) whose premise is this: when the budget is limited, a purely statistical and sometimes unconventional approach to spending leads to winning.

15 Tobermory Dr., a Toronto Community Housing highrise, has space for community programs, but not the city funding to operate them. They are one of 800 organizations that receive some city money annually. (Jennifer Pagliaro/Toronto Star)

“The consequences of failing to measure the impact of so many of our government programs — and of sometimes ignoring the data even when we do measure them — go well beyond wasting scarce tax dollars,” the authors of the Atlantic piece wrote. “Every time a young person participates in a program that doesn’t work but could have participated in one that does, that represents a human cost.”

At a glance, Toronto’s funding by neighbourhood between 2008 and 2013 shows a clear slant towards funding downtown organizations.

Miller explained that the by-neighbourhood allocations are based on where organizations are headquartered, with some programs also financing satellite offices or services in communities outside their borders. This could explain why places like the Bay Street corridor have a much higher funding total.

But when asked how they track the real impact of that funding, Miller said the city relies on “self reporting,” followed by a formal staff assessment of the reports provided.

Grant figures by individual neighbourhoods for 2013 were not available from the city. But a ward-by-ward analysis by the Star showed that some areas that were home to multiple neighbourhood improvement areas received very little funding. Ward 9, York Centre, in North York, for example, contains three neighbourhood improvement areas, but received only $177,435 in community grant funding last year.

By comparison, the downtown Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina, which contains no neighbourhood improvement areas, received $8.6 million last year.

And despite a stated goal of funding those neighbourhoods, the city does not have data on how much grant money is currently going to neighbourhood improvement areas.

The city also hasn’t kept data on which funded organizations worked in priority neighbourhoods in previous years — making it impossible to see which programs are being underfunded or having the most impact.

Miller said the city is looking for ways to “investigate how we can best collect this information in an accurate way.”

The final say on who gets funded remains up to council, which votes on the allocations distributed each year.

Most community organizations are worried not only about their level of funding, but how stable that money is from year to year.

Neighbourhoods such as Glenfield-Jane Heights, Regent Park, Moss Park and Oakridge saw dramatic funding declines between 2008 and 2011, with some recorded as receiving no money in 2011 — when overall funding took a dramatic budgetary hit under Rob Ford to total under $14 million.

Miller said “it is not uncommon” for organizations to get second-time funding or have multiyear requests granted.

“Investment programs are open to new applicants each year, and therefore grant recipients do fluctuate from year to year,” she wrote.

Despite an additional $300,000 budgeted by council to “support emerging needs in underserved areas” in 2014 and 2015, Miller said the city program is “very competitive” and still receives more applications than it’s possible to fulfill.

John Campey, executive director for Social Planning Toronto, says city money plays an important role in the bigger funding picture, often providing the anchor that allows many organizations to even exist.

But as the city’s population continues to grow, and with the suburbs continuing to be underserved, Campey said there is increasing pressure on programming funds that have not kept pace.

“I honestly think the city does a relatively good job of identifying what’s needed to maintain a basic community infrastructure, and on top of that targeting specific needs with the resources that are available,” Campey said. “It again comes down to an issue of political will.”

An October report by Social Planning cites data collected by the city that shows Toronto spent $17.70 per capita on grants in 2010-2011, compared with $66.72 in Calgary, $45.20 in Winnipeg, and $40.73 in Ottawa. Toronto spent 0.5 per cent of its total budget on grants, while the other major cities spent between 1.6 per cent and 2.7 per cent.

“The situation for many people is in fact desperate,” Campey said. “It’s really frustrating in a sense to have to push the city to support community organizations to fill gaps in service that 10 or 20 years ago we took for granted would be dealt with by other levels of government.”

Susan McIsaac, president and CEO of United Way Toronto, said the need in many communities is still not being met, but she argued organizations like hers, which plays a key role in the strong-neighbourhoods framework and funding, are doing a much better job at being proactive and strategic about where investments are made.

“We really do have a problem with division, and I think a lot about the geographic nature of poverty in Toronto — the fact that we do have these neighbourhoods that have really fallen behind,” she said. “We need to focus on where the need is greatest and we need to actually apply resources against that geographic landscape.”

Dennis Keshinro — who is on the road in Jane and Finch with a convoy of refurbished TTC buses designed to be mobile community spaces for youth — has little faith the city will prop them up.

For years, Keshinro, a longtime community advocate who runs the Belka Enrichment Centre, said the organization applied for city money — at first with limited success. They were funded between $6,000 and $10,000. But organizations pay upwards of $3,000 for the financial audits the city required, he said — putting a huge dent in their total program funds. In 2011, he finally gave up.

“It was a waste of time,” said Keshinro, who works full-time as a high school teacher and runs his homework and sports programs after school and on weekends.

He is able to continue through his own grassroots efforts, including the personal support and fundraising of now Mayor John Tory, who helped finance Keshinro’s dream of renovating a decommissioned city bus into a mobile computer lab for students. He parks the bus so kids can climb aboard to do homework and get help with their projects.

Like the Tobermory group, he has dreams of what he could build.

“The city has a lot of power to take care of organizations, but they’re not doing it. They’re just looking for the big guys,” Keshinro said.

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